Web pages connected to the Internet may be configured to provide advertisement placement opportunities. When a user of the Internet accesses a commercial Web site, the user may be greeted with a popup advertisement, portions of the viewing screen occupied by fixed or animated advertisements, scrolling banners, or fixed or moving advertisements that appear when the user clicks on links or performs steps in a purchase. Internet advertisement opportunities appear based on space, time, content, and user context and may be highly non-linear (i.e., the user chooses to initiate the playing of content and in response, the content starts).
Traditionally, programming of broadcast and cable television and radio, including content (i.e., the video or audio program) and (the placement of) ads in a video or audio signal stream, has followed a linear model. Programming may be linear in the sense that a program begins and is streamed and in progress when a user chooses to view entertainment content. FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional linear or video-on-demand (VOD) model for advertisement placement. Entertainment content 2, when processed as a digital data stream over a cable network, may be divided into a number of time intervals. The time intervals 4 include time reserved for a viewed program (content), such as “Golden Girls.” The intervals 6, 8, 9, represent sections of time reserved for advertisements or “avails.” These “avails” may be viewed as advertisement placement opportunities. As used herein, a “placement opportunity” was traditional called an avail and is sometimes referred to as a slot (into which a spot (e.g., an ad or content) is to be inserted). A placement opportunity (PO) is a construct that represents an opportunity to insert an advertisement or entertainment content, and defines the rules for that opportunity, such as its duration, interactivity, ownership, and technical constraints.
As used herein, a “spot” is an ad placed in a placement opportunity.
As used herein, the term “binding” refers to an identification of signals and content within a placement opportunity (PO). PO's are frequently created for broad amounts of content that are not yet published (i.e., any show on TNT network in the evening). When the show airs and a signal is detected, the signal is bound to the relevant PO's for that show.
As used herein, the term “impression” refers to a showing of an advertisement to a single viewer. For example, if a 30 second spot is placed in 50,000 video-on-demand (VOD) streams and it is known that 30,000 of the streams actually played the ad, then 30,000 impressions of that advertisement have been generated.
As used herein, a “status notification” may be, but is not limited to, an HTTP call from a VOD server with a unique ID that was created when a decision was delivered.
As used herein, the term “break” refers to all of the space in a stream between entertainment content. For example, a group of 4 consecutive 30 second spots between 2 segments of “Two and a Half Men” may be considered as a single break.
As used herein, an estimated starting location of a break in a signal stream is referred to as a signal point. In the context of advertisement placement, these signal points may be referred to as advertisement signal points.
In non-linear systems, such as Video-on-Demand (VOD), the intervals 6, 8, 9 may take on new meanings. The interval 6 is called a pre-roll, i.e., the space in a video that occurs immediately after a user clicks to start a VOD video. The interval 9 is known as a post-roll, i.e., the space after all of the VOD video segments have finished playing. The intervals 8 may be mid-rolls, i.e., mini-breaks in the middle of a VOD video, or may be interstitials, i.e., pod-like locations between consecutive VOD video segments. VOD advertisement placement opportunities may appear based on space, time, content, and user context and may be highly non-linear (i.e., the user chooses to initiate the playing of content and in response, the content starts). All of the intervals 6, 8, 9 in such play lists are ripe for the insertion of advertisements, i.e., advertisement placement opportunities.
In the traditional model for the placement of ads in television programming, avails are specified by a simple combination of channel and time and decided weeks ahead of broadcast. However, new cable content delivery systems permit advertising spots of varying duration, permit different levels of interactivity (e.g., polling or linking) through the use of buttons on a remote control, may be defined by geography, etc. In a world where TV viewing is becoming increasingly non-linear (e.g., video-on-demand (VOD), networked-based personal video recorders (PVR), interactive programs), a key goal of advertisement opportunity placement systems is to determine how to define placement opportunities that are non-deterministic and manifest dynamically. Advanced advertising needs to accommodate advertisement placement opportunities that are invoked by user events, which may include anything from playback of a VOD title to pausing one's DVR. As the scope of potential placement opportunities expands accordingly, it becomes necessary to precisely define those placement opportunities with attributes representing relevant business rules. These may be used to specify such things as inventory splits, quantity, duration, and position of ad breaks (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll); placement of pause ads and overlays; and levels and types of interactivity.
On the Internet, a content publisher and an advertiser may be isolated from one another, with an advertising network acting as an intermediary. On TV, the advertising network was formerly the national network, the cable network, or the cable operator, that had fixed avails. However, emerging advanced advertising standards for dynamic television provide an opportunity for content providers to derive value from a cable operator's ad placement infrastructure by creating new and more flexible advertising inventory (i.e., Potential Viewership*Placement Opportunities=Advertising Inventory). This new business model imposes unique technical challenges: unlike the Internet, where browsers access/display content and then are separately “referred” to a shared ad network, the cable television infrastructure selects and assembles both the advertisement and the content together in the network and delivers the combined result to customers' set top boxes. For this to work, cable television advanced advertising networks may at least partially operate within the infrastructure of a Multiple System/Service Operator (MSO—a cable TV organization that owns more than one cable system and may prove broadband Internet service). To achieve optimal addressability and user experience and achieve bandwidth efficiencies, advertising service elements and digital delivery components need to be located close to the edge of a network, i.e., at or near set top boxes. Decisions need to be made based upon relevant context (infrastructure, platform, content, geography, demographics, etc.), which are applicable to non-advertisements as well (e.g., suggested content). By making placement decisions and insertions at the time of a user request—or even at the appropriate times during content playout—fully dynamic ad placement may be achieved.
FIG. 2 depicts a configuration of a conventional Internet-based cable television infrastructure 200 for performing advertising placement decisions in signal streams for both an MSO 202a (e.g., Comcast) and a network provider 202b (e.g., “ABC”) each providing Internet-based television. Unlike the Internet, where browsers access/display content and then are separately “referred” to a shared advertisement network, the Internet-based television infrastructure 200 selects and assembles both the advertisement and the content together and delivers the combined result to customers' “smart appliances” 204a-204n (e.g., Internet ready televisions, radios, smartphones, tablets, PCs, etc.).
Smart appliances 204a-204n, such as Internet-ready televisions, have become capable of receiving content from Internet streaming services, such as Netflix movies, Pandora streaming radio, etc., over WiFi or direct Ethernet connections. When a user clicks on an icon for an “app” that appears on the television set corresponding to one of these services, the content is streamed to the smart appliance 204a-204n from a content delivery network (CDN) 206a, 206b directly to the application running in the smart appliance 204a-204n without the need for a set top box.
A set top box may be configured to decode an analog representation of two states of a digital signal, as is known in the art, that is continuously streamed and pushed to the set top box through a broadcast facility over a coaxial or fiber optic cable and the set top box tunes to that channel and displays the content. When a user watches Internet-delivered program content, a browser within the smart appliance 204a-204n fetching video in predetermined time chunks—generally two sometimes three, sometimes ten second chunks. The fetched chunks of video are seamlessly stitched together dynamically in the application software of the smart appliance 204a-204n and then displayed so as to appear as a smooth video on the smart appliance 204a-204n. 
The MSO 202a or network 202b may wish to rebroadcast video streams on smart appliances. Unfortunately, every connected device, including smart appliances, needs to obtain video in the format that it can consume. Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc., have very specific and incompatible formats. To overcome this problem, each of these companies has constructed facilities called content delivery networks (CDN) 206a, 206b where a “set top box” for each channel is configured to receive broadcasts from satellites 208a, 208b. A signal received by a “set top box” from upstream devices 210a, 210b communicatively connected to the satellites 208a, 208b is fed to transcoders 212a, 212b to place the signal in a desired format and to fragment the formatted signal into the predetermined (e.g., 2 second) segments of data. These segments are then stored at the CDNs 206a, 206b on server farms located in the vicinity of where the content is to be delivered.
MSOs 202a and Content Networks 202b often share ad space or inventory in a video streams. As described above, placement opportunities on broadcasted streams may be delineated by distinct 30 second spots where each owner can place an ad from their media business. In Unicast streams where the same video may be watched by multiple parties, placement opportunities may be “split” among one or more MSOs 202a and/or Content Networks 202b according to agreed-upon percentages. These so-called “percentage splits” or “inventory splits” may be agreed to by the MSO 202a and a Content Network 202b (e.g., 20% is for the MSO), wherein, for example, an MSO 202a may be granted 20% of the avails.
During deliver of the content (e.g., video, audio, data, etc.), advertisements may be dynamically inserted into the content in certain locations in the content called ad breaks. Content provider routers 214a, 214b under the control of an associated ad service (ADS) 216a, 216b dynamically insert the advertisements into the content provided by the CDNs 206a, 206b before delivery to the smart appliances 204a-204n. 
If a service provider is an MSO 202a, such as Comcast, the MSO 202a may provide a customer with an application (hereinafter an “app”) to permit viewing of content from a plurality of networks (e.g., ABC). When a customer “clicks” on a Comcast app icon, the customer may watch, after logging into the Comcast app, all of the content provided by Comcast, including, but not limited to ABC. When the customer “clicks” on an app icon provided directly by a content network 202b (e.g., ABC), the customer, after logging into the ABC app, may watch ABC network content provided in a customized way, but still of the same content as provided with the Comcast app. The login information permits CDNs 206a, 206b to identify an account to give credit for the customer playing content and advertisements to generate revenue.
Although ABC, in effect, is bypassing Comcast, ABC would like not to hurt its relationship with Comcast or affiliates. Therefore, ABC may compensate Comcast even when a user is viewing ABC over the ABC app instead of the Comcast app.
Both Comcast and ABC may have similar data paths through equipment and the Internet, but the ABC data path may bypass the CDN 204a associated with Comcast to a second CDN 206b associated with ABC that may be a bit further away from the CDN 206a of Comcast. The user is also logged into the content provider router 214b associated with ABC instead of the content provider router 214a associated with Comcast. The ADS 216a employed for dynamic ad insertion for the data path of Comcast may be encoded to provide a 20 percent inventory split between Comcast and ABC. The ADS 216b employed for dynamic ad insertion for the data path of ABC may be encoded to initially provide a 0 percent inventory split between Comcast and ABC. However, Comcast may believe it is entitled to the same 20% split or at least a 10% split using its own ADS 216a. 
Because the ADS 216a and the ADS 216b cannot “see” each other, less than advantageous splits for one party may result (e.g., ABC may be willing to provide Comcast with a 20% inventory split, but only during non-primetime hours).
Accordingly, what would be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a system and method for managing and verifying inventory splits.